Mythography and Generational Poetics in the Writings of Bob Dylan and F

Out of Minnesota: Mythography and Generational Poetics in the Writings of Bob Dylan and F. Scott Fitzgerald James D. Bloom Affinities "You've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books. You're very well read. It's well known." So runs a memorable line in Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" on his 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited. Not only did this song provide "an instant catchphrase for the moral, generational, and racial divisions" that, in Greil Marcus' formulation, separated the cognoscenti from the "squares" (8-9); this album also marked Dylan's controversial introduction to LP buyers of his paradigm-shifting hybrid, "folk rock." Brian Morton's 1991 novel, The Dylanist, describes the appeal of this watershed: "Dylan gave... hope: He showed that you could make your life a work of art" (91). Morton's protagonist "loved the way" Dylan "remained fluid, reinventing himself endlessly, refusing to be trapped by other people's expectations." Reflecting the pervasiveness of this appeal, Fred Goodman's social history of rock-music business declared Dylan "unquestion ably the most influential artist of his generation" (96). In view of Dylan's singular impact on his generation, his citation of Fitzgerald points to the aspiration and the achievement that place both writers among the select few, among a handful of modern writers who turned themselves into generational idols and their work into durable models. Dylan's famous 1965 breakthrough (the momentum of which persisted through his 1975 album Desire) clinched this icon status. The decisive point in this breakthrough occurred at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan scandalized fans by marrying his signature acoustic folk protest style with a seemingly more "commercial" electric 0026-3079/99/4001-005$2.00/0 American Studies, 40:1 (Spring 1999): 5-21 5 6 James D. Bloom rock-and-roll idiom. Ratifying this sea-change, Dylan framed this "folk-rock" assault on generic boundaries with the release of two albums, Bringing it all Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. Fellow protest folksinger Phil Ochs' reaction to one cut on Highway 61 illustrates this impact: "Phil, a huge fan of Dylan to begin with, was thunderstruck by this latest composition," entitled "Mr. Tambou rine Man." Ochs believed that "Dylan, already being labeled a spokesperson for his generation... had suddenly in the course of one song, come dangerously close to becoming a generation's poet" (Schumacher 82). Beyond such claims for Dylan as the 1960s generational poet, which invite obvious comparisons with Fitzgerald's status as a generational novelist in the 1920s—another youth-centered decade, and beyond coincidental geographical parallels—each artist's bourgeois Minnesota origins, the affinity between the two artists rests most significantly on a shared career narrative and cultural critique. Dylan's early song, "North Country Blues," a reminder of their shared Minnesota background, sums up this shared aesthetic as the discovery that "there ain't nothing here now to hold them." This poetics of unmooring lies at the heart of what Ronald Berman characterizes as "the movement in Fitzgerald ... toward existential heroism" (World 114) and the product of this movement: an art that recurrently depicts inconclusive arrivals, such as Tender is the Night hero Dick Diver's incessant beginnings of a "career . like Grant's in Galena" consisting well into middle age of "biding his time ... in one town or another"(315), with each town-to-town movement impelled by the decision Dylan affirms in "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall," as the decision to keep "goin' on out," the commitment reaffirmed throughout his songs, to "move on to the next hope" with "hard-eyed ... skepticism" (Edmundson 54) in the face of whatever defeat or humiliation looms. Careers This sort of language also greeted the 1920 publication of Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, and the later turns in Fitzgerald's career that came to be regarded as betrayals by many of his fans (Mangum 3-7). This Side of Paradise came "to influence us profoundly," according to the publisher, autobi- ographer, and self-appointed generational spokesman Donald Friede. Fitzgerald "set the pattern for the mood of the day," laying a "solid foundation for the basic philosophy of the whole decade. We were never the same again" (180). Favoring Dylan, English critic Michael Gray made the Fitzgerald-Dylan parallel explicit in suggesting that "there is a sense in which, more fully than Fitzgerald, Dylan created a generation" (5). Similarly, David Dunaway argues that "for the generation coming-of-age in the 1960s... there was no comparable... influence" to Dylan's. Dunaway elaborates by associating Dylan with earlier, cultural paradigm-shifters in an account recalling Fitzgerald's meteoric rise between 1920 and 1925. "Like that of Rimbaud, Dylan's recognition came impossibly fast, but being a god turns out to be a short-lived occupation." Consequently, Out of Minnesota 7 Figure 1: Cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 book, Tales of the Jazz Age. Courtesy of the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 8 James D. Bloom Dylan "has spent many years of his life trying to get to where he once was. To find another writer who so thoroughly affected his time, one has to probe in history— Voltaire, Shakespeare, Dickens" (154). Dunaway's potted history of cultural change recalls Nick Carraway's mid- novel rhapsody in The Great Gatsby equating the eponymous hero with "a son of God" (105) as well as his closing summary of his own "awkward unpleasant" (185) effort to return home. Dunaway's view of Dylan points to Gatsby as the center of Dylan's debt to Fitzgerald's legacy and underscores the lasting vitality of that legacy. Dylan's seizure of this legacy constitutes an enrichment, in contrast to the appropriations of it that became especially marked during the Reagan-era plutocracy revival—the Jay Mclnerney era to chroniclers of American fiction. A Gatsby-like Roaring 20s look (derived from a 1974 screen adaptation starring Robert Redford as Gatsby) briefly colored fashion advertising in the early eighties (Hurowitz), and at the end of the decade Calvin Klein turned to Gatsby— along with Madame Bovary and The Sun Also Rises—to caption print-ads for a new fragrance called Obsession (Foltz), while New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis more solemnly devoted an entire column to the Reagan administration's uncannily Gatsby-like "emptiness" and the way it "corrupted the American Dream." Four months earlier a Times editorial argued that "the eighties aren't so far past the twenties" inasmuch as "Jay Gatsby would be right at home today" in the company of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky. More recently, an Atlanta antiques shop called Gatsby's drew national media attention when it bought the auctioned belongings of convicted CIA mole Aldrich Ames. Unlike such merchandising ventures, Dylan's citation of Fitzgerald goes beyond name-dropping and glamour-mongering. In the context of Dylan's larger body of work, his Fitzgerald line belongs to an oeuvre-saturating acknowledgement of his debt to Fitzgerald and a profitable reinvestment of that legacy. In sarcastically singling Fitzgerald out as an index of cultural arrival, a measure of cultural-capital, Dylan prompts listeners to the songs of his most influential and most conspicuously literary period, between 1964-1975, to account for Fitzgerald' s endurance as artistic resource and incitement. This affiliation extends beyond obvious biographical parallels between the two Minnesota college dropouts who grew up non-Protestant in America's Lutheran heartland before heading east to triumph as artists, to transform radically their respective media, and to become generational icons. Dylan's pursuit of this Fitzgeraldian agenda seems most evident in his refashioning of Bobby Zimmerman into Bob Dylan. This move recalls how Jimmy Gatz, also a fugitive from the Lake Superior littoral, where he fatefully rescued a grateful tycoon's yacht, began refashioning himself into Jay Gatsby. The extent to which Dylan "sprang from a Platonic conception of himself ' (106) and thus the extent to which Dylan, like Fitzgerald, regards "the crafting of identity as demiurgic activity" (Weinstein 131) resonates in Martha Bayles' image of "Zimmerman hanging around every coffeehouse in Greenwich Village, playing for pennies and Out of Minnesota 9 promoting a mythic identity as 'Bob Dylan,' a precocious drifter who had spent his youth traveling the highways and byways and learning his music directly from the folk" (210-217). This mythic identity contrasts markedly with the prosaic stability of Dylan's Hibbing, Minnesota, boyhood in "the Jewish mercantile middle class of America's Midwest" (Friedlander 136) and his brief stint at the University of Minnesota before departing for Greenwich Village in 1960. Such transformations involve efforts to ride the Zeitgeists of their respective decades—in Gatsby's becoming a sporty Anglophile bootlegger and in Dylan's becoming an indignant bohemian iconoclast. "By taking a new name," biogra pher Justin Kaplan notes, "an unfinished person may hope to enter into more dynamic—but not necessarily more intimate—transactions, both with the world outside and with his or her 'true soul, ' the naked self." The description of Gatsby ' s self-transformation in chapter 6 of the novel stresses its lack of "intimacy" and the extent to which both Gatsby himself as well as his various audiences only got to regard him at a distance: as an "invention," as a "conception," as a "legend," and as "news" (103-104). This chapter also emphasizes the turbulence or "dyna mism" of Gatz's metamorphosis with such verbs as "spin" and "rock" and "tangle," complemented by images of Gatsby as a master of "bracing" outdoor manual labor (104-105).

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